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What if I told you there almost wasn’t a raven in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven”? What if I told you that, instead of having his nameless narrator drive himself mad beneath the shadow of a grim and stately raven of the saintly days of yore, Poe almost went with a parrot?

I agree with your derisive scoff. But the truth is this ridiculous hypothetical isn’t quite as ridiculous or hypothetical as you might think. It’s absolutely true — for a split second, Poe was going to write “The Parrot.”

The reason this seems so instinctually wrong has a great deal to do with our collective idea of Poe. While even people uninterested in literature were probably forced to read a couple of his short stories or poems in school, that alone can’t account for his iconic status in pop culture. To give just one example, his face appears on countless t-shirts, which are usually jet-black and adorned with dead-eyed ravens, chalk-white skulls (sometimes his own, poking through his flesh), and other equally chipper images, along with the occasional quote about insanity or despair. Not that such merchandise needs to add much to get across a macabre vibe — with his sunken eyes, bulging forehead, and perpetual grimace he apparently thought counted as a smile, Poe’s face alone conveys the dark tone of the dark world with which we associate him.

The problem is that this idea of Poe marketed to people through shirts and mugs and so much more is an unfair caricature of a profound and multifaceted artist. I’ll admit that there are more than enough heartbroken men sleeping alongside dead lovers in crypts and mass murders at masque balls — and that’s without going into the weird stories — to justify seeing Poe strictly as a horror writer. But he wrote far more than simply horror. For instance, those who are familiar with more than just his most famous works likely know about his character C. Augustin Dupin, a coldly logical detective so similar to Sherlock Holmes it’s easy to forget that Holmes was influenced by Dupin, not the other way around. As much as he had a permanent impact on horror, Poe was just as important in the development of detective fiction.

But what truly makes Poe so unique among authors is the mathematical philosophy underpinning his work, and there is no better way to appreciate the strange synthesis between art and science Poe achieved than by examining his essay, “The Philosophy of Composition.” This essay offers invaluable insight into how Poe created “The Raven,” and offers hope to any of us who have ever picked up a pen and tried to translate the hurricane of nameless emotions within us into words so that we might better understand ourselves.

2.
Poe’s “The Philosophy of Composition” could almost have been titled, “The Anti-Poetic Manifesto.” That’s because before he gets to explaining precisely how “The Raven” came to be, he spends the first few paragraphs launching a savage attack against the idea of poets he believes most people possess. Specifically, he loathes the idea that poets are some kind of elevated species, far more insightful and wise than the rest of the slobbering masses. But he doesn’t blame us for this misleading impression; he blames writers. Early on, Poe claims, “Most writers — poets in especial – prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy — and ecstatic intuition — and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes.” This charge brings to mind a letter John Keats wrote to John Taylor on February 27, 1818, in which he said, “…if Poetry comes not as naturally as the leaves to a tree it had better not come at all.” Keats might not have claimed to be inspired by a “fine frenzy” or “ecstatic intuition,” but there is still a sense that great poetry either bursts out of us perfectly polished from the start or…not, with no in-between. Poe, in contrast, not only disagrees, but believes great poetry can only exist by working through that in-between. Put another way, Poe does not treat poetry as a gift someone must be born with to possess at all, but a craft that can be honed through practice. And if it really is a craft, well, then why couldn’t any of us write “The Raven”?

You might be derisively scoffing for the second time, but why not? If nothing else, “The Philosophy of Composition” argues forcefully and repeatedly that good writing is the result of good choices. The key is to know what questions to ask, something Poe teaches us through an examination of every choice he made to produce “The Raven,” going so far as to say that his essay will “render it manifest that no one point in its composition is referable either to accident or intuition — that the work proceeded, step by step, to its completion with the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.”

Poe isn’t kidding. He goes into such meticulous detail that it would be impossible to discuss every choice. To give a taste of the essay, however, it’s worth examining how some of the most famous elements of “The Raven” came to be.

To begin with, how did he come up with the subject of the poem? First, Poe considered “Beauty…the sole legitimate province of the poem,” or, more specifically, “the contemplation of the beautiful.” Poe also believed “Melancholy is…the most legitimate of all the poetical tones.” Put these two ideas together, and Poe concluded that “the death, then, of a beautiful woman is…the most poetical topic in the world — equally is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover.”

Moving onto more mechanical elements, how did Poe come up with the haunting, “Nevermore”? Well, first he decided using a refrain at all would be a good idea because so many great artists have used it before, and, “The universality of its employment sufficed to assure me of its intrinsic value, and spared me the necessity of submitting it to analysis.” Then, he decided the refrain should be brief and determined on the “character” of the word by noting that “o” is “the most sonorous vowel, with r as the most producible consonant.”

But how to naturally insert the refrain? This question puzzles Poe at first. After all, if he was going to have a dialogue with two characters, it would be hard to imagine how one could always appropriately respond with the same word to the other’s, presumably varied, questions. Unless, that is, one person in this dialogue was not a person, but an animal. This leads to my favorite line in the essay, where Poe explains “very naturally, a parrot, in the first instance, suggested itself, but was superseded forthwith by a Raven, as equally capable of speech, and infinitely more in keeping with the intended tone.” So while Poe only considered using a parrot for a moment, the fact he considered it at all once again demonstrates the open, dispassionate, and logical approach he used (plus it makes for a fun story).

3.“The Philosophy of Composition” is worth reflecting on for three reasons, regardless of whether you are a Poe expert or neophyte. First, it thoroughly traces the writing process. There have been plenty of critical essays on the writing process at least as far back as Aristotle’sPoetics, where he argues for the three unities (time, place, and action), contrasts the strengths and weaknesses of epics versus tragedies, etc. But Aristotle was critiquing the works of others, primarily Homer and Sophocles. Here, Poe is critiquing Poe with the objectivity of a scientist studying a specimen under a microscope.

The essay also shatters the facsimile of Poe peddled by popular culture. As soon as you step outside his most famous stories and poems, you will see Poe’s intimidatingly vast knowledge all sorts of subjects, including Greek, Latin, mythology, philosophy, and science, with references to Apollo, Charles Babbage, Seneca, and Francis Bacon, to name only a few. You will also see how frequently mathematics are evoked, whether in stories as disparate as “The Purloined Letter” or “Ligea” or in his other technical works, such as “The Rationale of Verse,” where he declares that, “[Verse] is exceedingly simple; one tenth of it, possibly, may be called ethical; nine tenths, however, appertain to mathematics.”

But the third, and most important, reason this essay should be read more is the way it democratizes writing. It’s easy to fall into the misconception Poe tries so hard to dispel in his essay about poetry being the result of a “fine frenzy.” I certainly find it hard to believe that the eeriness of the line, “And its eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming” or the mysterious beauty of the opening lines of “Annabel Lee” – “It was many and many a year ago, in a kingdom by the sea” – are the result of logic. Yet for Poe they were precisely that, the results of deciding on the right answers after asking the right questions.

“The Philosophy of Composition” proves you don’t need to wait for, let alone be born possessing, poetic inspiration to write well. And that is an inspiring idea.

Maybe we should lay this one on Cormac McCarthy. In 2006, after writing a string of rigorously realistic literary novels that seemed to come down to us from some remote desert Olympus, McCarthy delivered an utterly out-of-character book. The Road was set in the near future after a vaguely defined cataclysm – “a long shear of light and then a series of concussions” – had turned the planet into a wintry ashtray, wiped out most of mankind, and erased civilization. The novel was post-apocalyptic and viciously dystopian and, most amazing of all, unashamed of its genre trappings. It was not exactly news in 2006 that the once-impregnable walls separating literary genres were beginning to crumble. But when The Road won the Pulitzer Prize, became an Oprah pick and got made into a major motion picture, it suddenly seemed that writers of every persuasion, from highbrows to hacks, had the green light to explore that realm once seen as the preserve of writers of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction: the near future.
Emily St. John Mandel, a colleague of mine here at The Millions, has just been named a finalist for the National Book Award for her fourth novel, Station Eleven, a highly literary work set in the near future that focuses on a Shakespearean troupe that travels the Great Lakes region performing for survivors of a flu pandemic that wiped out most of mankind and ended civilization. Here, in Mandel’s words, is what such a world might look like:
An incomplete list:
No more diving into pools of chlorinated water lit green from below.
No more ball games played out under floodlights. No more porch lights with moths fluttering on summer nights. No more trains running under the surface of cities on the dazzling power of the electric third rail. No more cities. No more films… No more pharmaceuticals. No more certainty of surviving a scratch on one’s hand, a cut on a finger while chopping vegetables for dinner, or a dog bite…
No more flight…
Mandel, in an interview with the New York Times, cited McCarthy’s take on the end of civilization as a liberating force for herself and like-minded writers. “It’s almost as if The Road gave more literary writers permission to approach the subject,” she said.
That Times article dissected the “cluster” of recent and forthcoming novels that are set in bleak worlds after civilization has crumbled. The article speculates that this cluster – books by Howard Jacobson, Michel Faber, and Benjamin Percy, among others, plus Station Eleven and the Divergent and Hunger Games series – is fed by our era’s anxieties over pandemics, environmental catastrophes, energy shortages, terrorism, and civil unrest. Today’s headlines about the international spread of Ebola are sure to deepen this anxiety.
(It’s worth noting that novelists aren’t the only ones drawn to the dark possibilities of the near future. The makers of movies and television shows are churning out dystopian fare set in a future inhabited by a few decent souls trying to navigate worlds riddled with cannibals, zombies and totalitarian cults.)
For many years, the near future has beckoned writers as different as Margaret Atwood, Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, J.G. Ballard, Aldous Huxley, and Philip K. Dick. They’ve recently been joined by a growing legion of literary novelists that includes Kazuo Ishiguro, Colson Whitehead, Michael Cunningham, David Mitchell, and many others. As these writers have shown, fiction set in the near future can be post-apocalyptic, but it doesn’t have to be. It can be dystopian, but it doesn’t have to be. (It is, however, almost always dark.) It can contain elements of fantasy, magic realism and/or science fiction, but it doesn’t have to. In the end, labels are less interesting to me than writerly strategies: What is gained by setting a work of fiction in the near future?
A good place to start looking for an answer is Gary Shteyngart’s 2010 novel, Super Sad True Love Story, a satire set in New York City around the year 2018. Rather than imagining some environmental or economic upheaval, Shteyngart has simply taken today’s technology and tried to extrapolate what it will be doing to us a few years from now. The novel bristles with devices like the äppärät, a pendant that broadcasts the wearer’s scores on everything from looks to “fuckability” to credit rating. An individual’s credit rating is also displayed on sidewalk “credit poles.” The currency of choice is the “yuan-pegged dollar” because the old dollar is worthless. Women wear see-through jeans called Onionskins. Hipsters have migrated from Brooklyn to Staten Island. Nobody reads books anymore. (On an airplane, a fellow passenger upbraids the protagonist, Lenny Abramov, for cracking open an actual book: “Duder, that thing smells like wet socks.”) The country is run by the right-wing Bipartisan Party, and American society is made up of elite High Net Worth Individuals – and everybody else. Lenny Abramov is the “The Life Lovers Outreach Coordinator (Grade G) of the Post-Human Services Division of Staatling-Wapachung Corporation,” which provides life-extension services to anyone who’s got a pile of money and a desire to live forever. The novel becomes, among other things, a very funny portrait of the twinned hells of post-literacy and constant connectivity.
Shteyngart has said that when he started writing the book in 2006, he imagined a future in which Lehman Brothers, General Motors, and Chrysler all tanked. Two years into the writing, those companies actually tanked. “So I had to make things worse and worse,” Shteyngart told The Nation. “That’s one of the difficulties of writing a novel these days – there doesn’t seem to be a present to write about. Everything is the future.” Another difficulty, as Shteyngart discovered, is the novelist’s need to walk the increasingly blurry line that separates the plausible from the outlandish.
William Gibson, who made his name in the 1980s writing science fiction novels set in a future heavily influenced by then-nascent computer technology, is now going against the grain: He recently started setting his fiction in the present. “Novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written,” he told The Paris Review in 2011, adding, “For years I’d found myself telling interviewers and readers that I believed it was possible to write a novel set in the present that would have an effect very similar to the effect of the novels I had set in imaginary futures…I finally decided I had to call myself on it.”
It’s a wrinkle on Shteyngart’s discovery: technology is changing so fast that there’s no longer a present; the future is already here, relentlessly unspooling into the past. Which presents its own counter-intuitive challenge, as Gibson sees it: “It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future.”
Michael McGhee has set his first novel, Happiness Ltd., somewhere between the worlds of Mandel’s extreme post-apocalyptic future and Shteyngart’s more recognizable near future. In the middle of the 21st century, the novel’s titular entity governs the developed world like Amazon on steroids, crushing competition, feeding the public a diet of happy news, and demanding that people consume the abundant goods and services offered by the Bountiful Age. Celebrities are worshipped, lifespans are artificially extended, and after a major economic collapse and years of devastating storms, watery lower Manhattan has been walled off and ceded to disenfranchised persons, or DPs, who refuse to be seduced by the consumer society’s ubiquitous baubles. There are strong whiffs of Huxley and Orwell in this smiley-face dystopia. There is also an echo of the difficult love affair at the center of Super Sad True Love Story – when Nelson, a rising star in Happiness Ltd.’s news management operation, falls in love with a DP named Celia, trouble is inevitable. Such slumming is fiercely discouraged by the powers that be.
In an email, McGhee explained his decision to set his novel near the middle of this century: “To me, the appeal of near-future fiction is its invitation to tweak society’s nose – to take today’s standards and extend them to a ridiculous extreme. For example, modern American culture encourages us to spend beyond our limits – what happens tomorrow when a cash-strapped government requires us to spend beyond our limits? Or, today our culture practically worships celebrities. What happens tomorrow when some of us literally worship celebrities? It’s a fertile field for satire.”
Like Shteyngart, McGhee learned that current events have a way of outracing a writer’s imagination. “The peril is that the near future has a propensity for arriving faster than you expect,” he writes. “It took me 10 years to write Happiness Ltd., and almost all the fantastic features I started with – advertisers tracking our every move, hurricanes ravaging lower Manhattan – came true before I was finished.”
Edan Lepucki, another colleague of mine here at The Millions, hit the New York Times bestseller list this summer with her dystopian debut novel, California. Set in the near future, it tells the story of a young couple, Frida and Cal, who flee southern California after a string of financial and environmental catastrophes, then try to eke out a life in the northern woods. America has finally become what it is now firmly on its way to becoming: a bifurcated society, where the haves live in gated communities, and the have-nots like Frida and Cal live in decayed cities or the wilderness. Like Shteyngart’s future America, Lepucki’s is a country of High Net Worth Individuals – and everybody else.
Lepucki, in an email, described the allure of the near future this way: “I loved the challenge of speculation, of imagining certain present-day conflicts (oil crisis, climate change, disappearing tax base in dying cities) escalating to an intense degree. I also liked the freedom of a post-technological world, and how that added mystery to my characters' lives, and deepened their isolation. And it was just fun to play pretend, to really fling myself into this new, unfamiliar landscape; I had never done that in fiction. Last, there was a real sense, when I was writing this book, that the characters' conflicts mattered. I'd never had such a strong and accessible sense of dramatic propulsion when writing, and I think the apocalypse had something to do with it.”
There is, she added, a flipside: “To create a believable future you have to think logically through certain large-scale events, which is so different from my usual concern when writing fiction; I usually work on a much smaller scale, considering a made-up person, putting them in a room, and letting them interact with another made-up person.”
If I see a thread running through these books and their authors’ comments, it would be this: the near future is an alluring time to set fiction because it frees the writer’s imagination in ways that writing about the past does not. Fiction set in the near future frees the writer to build a plausible and coherent world on a known foundation – in a sense, to extrapolate where today’s world is going. It’s a liberating strategy since the future is so patently unknowable; and it’s a timely strategy since people in an anxious age like ours are especially eager to know – or imagine – where we’re headed.
If today’s crop of books, movies and TV shows set in the near future are an accurate barometer, it looks like we’re in for some filthy weather.
Image via mikelehen/Flickr

It's a business-school truism that great leaders make for messy successions. Not only are their shoes hard to fill; no boss likes to contemplate his or her own obsolescence. (Think of Steve Jobs. Hell, think of King Lear.) And though its masthead is more likely to have graduated from Brown than from Wharton, the literary magazine is as subject as any other enterprise to the general principle. William Shawn's 35-year streak as editor-in-chief of The New Yorker, for example, yielded to the comparatively brief reigns of Robert Gottlieb and Tina Brown. Roger D. Hodge's tenure at Harper's, following the second long Lewis H. Lapham regime, lasted all of two years.
Even amid such tough acts to follow, the case of George Plimpton stands out. As the longtime editor of The Paris Review, Plimpton did the traditional things imposingly well. He charted the magazine's direction. He developed features. He cultivated and supported good writing. But he also, through his journalistic talents and his presence on the social scene, expanded our idea of what an editor could be: founder, ringmaster, patron, host, impresario, fundraiser, cheerleader, public face, presiding spirit, and living embodiment of the brand. Though slender of frame, he cast a big shadow.
Upon Plimpton's death in 2003, Brigid Hughes, then the managing editor, was tapped to lead the magazine. She was soon shown the door (a circumstance which led to the founding of A Public Space, with the help of a cadre of writers and donors loyal to Hughes) and the journalist Philip Gourevitch slotted into the role, somewhat against type. Gourevitch's Paris Review has been more consistently appealing than one might have expected it to be. (A great reporter does not always a great editor make.) But, given that Gourevitch has been more of a caretaker than a visionary, it was no great surprise to learn in November that he would be stepping down to focus on his own writing...leaving The Paris Review searching for its fourth editor-in-chief in seven years.
The good news is that the pool of available talent is probably larger now than it has been in years. I'd happily read a Paris Review run by former Spy editor Kurt Andersen, who writes well, is interested in everything, and seems to have a Rolodex the size of a card catalog. Likewise Dan Menaker. In the wake of Hodge's departure from Harper's last month, his name has been thrown around as well. If I was on the search committee, I'd certainly be looking at Keith Gessen, who, though young, is something of a scholar of the little magazine. Or The Paris Review could again try to hire in-house. (Having had a piece edited by Meghan O'Rourke, who pulls double duty with Slate, I'd hire her for just about anything.)
Finding the next Plimpton, however, is more than a matter of editorial acumen. The Plimptonian editor must be out in the world. She cuts a figure. She makes fireworks, and shoots them off, too. Tina Brown, now of The Daily Beast, and Vanity Fair's Graydon Carter have certainly learned a thing or two from Plimpton, but the only editor currently working in the world of little magazines who fulfills the polymathic model is Dave Eggers. And so, as absurd as it may sound prima facie, I'd like to propose that Eggers is the best candidate for editorship of The Paris Review. And, somewhat counterintuitively, that hiring him for the job might be as good for Eggers as for the magazine.
Eggers is an entrepreneur of distinction, a gifted fund-raiser, a networker, a talent scout, a celebrity, a philanthropist, and an accomplished graphic designer. Moreover, he has a particular editorial capacity that's always in rare supply: the capacity for vision. At his first two magazines - Might and (especially) McSweeney's - Eggers helped to distill into literary form the sensibility of those who came of age after The End of History...and before history unceremoniously resumed. Whimsical, highly aestheticized, conspicuously casual, reverent of childhood and its signifiers, bound by the dialectic of irony and sincerity, the style of McSweeney's has become the style of post-post-Modernism. It is No One Belongs Here More Than You and Everything Here Is The Best Thing Ever, yes, but also American Apparel and Avenue Q, the films of Michel Gondry and the career of Michael Cera. It is vast swaths of Echo Park and the Bay Area and Brooklyn.
The first obvious objection, then, to the marriage of Eggers and The Paris Review comes from Eggers' side of the aisle: he already has a magazine. But the truth is that McSweeney's (reportedly intended to have a forty-eight issue run, followed by a long hiatus) has, in its middle age, begun to run up against its built-in limitations. One need not slight the magazine itself (the recent "Panorama" issue, a loving tribute to the print newspaper and a manifesto on its behalf, reportedly sold out), or rehearse the whiplash speed at which subculture becomes mainstream, to feel that McSweeney's some time ago made the move from innovation to institution.
The Paris Review, too, is an institution, but one with a broader mission and a broader potential audience - a place where readers of McSweeney's, readers of Newsweek, and readers of The New York Review of Books might meet and mingle en masse. And because its appeal is less bound up with youth, it might offer Eggers, now pushing 40, new and different challenges...even as McSweeney's continued under the able hands that one sort of imagines mostly run it now anyway.
The second obstacle to the union is that Eggers, like Gourevitch, is a writer, and writing takes time away from editing. But here, too, Eggers, for all his successes, seems like a man in need of a jolt. His literary talent has always recalled for me David Foster Wallace's description of the tennis player's physique: hypertrophied in places and underdeveloped in others. This is true to some extent of all writers, but truer of Eggers than of, say his kind-of contemporary (and sometime collaborator) Zadie Smith. With impressive consistency, his books display visual acuity, inventive turns of phrase, and a fine ear for dialogue. Most importantly, they are full of compassion. But they also betray a countervailing tendency toward solipsism that the home crowd around McSweeney's has been unable or unwilling to call Eggers on, and that has held him back from being the novelist he seems to aspire to be. Which may be a way of suggesting that Eggers is still in his literary adolescence.
This solipsism expresses itself as constraint. There is, on the surface, a kind of airless stylization of the prose, all those floating pronouns and studied flatnesses. More deeply, there is the constraint solipsism imposes on plot and drama - on the interaction of characters, and thus, on their development. Of Eggers' longer narrative works, three are more or less nonfiction, one is a rewrite of a children's book, and two (You Shall Know Our Velocity and Away We Go) are lashed to picaresque conceits that substitute vignette for scene and propulsion for plot.
Most recently, these two forms of constraint - micro and macro - converged in the disappointing novelization, The Wild Things. Max goes to the island. Max does some stuff. Max does some other stuff. Then Max comes home. At no point in the book does Max, or his writer, feel the sense of discovery and possibility we saw in Spike Jonze's filmed sprint through the trees - or that marked the finest passages of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
The oddity of this is that Eggers is profoundly interested in other people. His best book overall, to my mind, has been What is the What, based on the story of Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. (I have not read Zeitoun, which seems to follow a similar strategy in telling the story of a Hurricane Katrina survivor.) This reportorial interest in the wider world is one that The Paris Review could nourish, even as it exposed Eggers to an even wider audience - one that might be less satisfied with his tics, and more demanding of writing in proportion with his enormous gifts.
Whether or not Eggers seriously considers throwing his hat into the ring, The Paris Review could certainly benefit from having an editor of his stature. The task that awaits Gourevitch's replacement may be more daunting than that which awaited him in 2005. In addition to hosting parties, raising funds, tending to the needs of writers, and serving as the public face of The Paris Review, the next editor will have to make the case to readers that, in this era of YouTube and the iPad, the bound literary quarterly is still worth their time and money. That's a mission Dave Eggers has already proven himself to be committed to. And The Paris Review, for nearly 60 years, has proven its commitment to the kind of great American writing I'd like to see more of from Eggers. Odds are these two commitments will be pursued on parallel tracks. But wouldn't it be great if they could meet?

One comment:

Thanks for this piece. I’ve always been fascinated with this little essay from Poe.

I have to say, though, that I’m put off by your comment in the final section about how “The Philosophy” essay “shatters the facsimile of Poe peddled by popular culture.” I suppose this is true to the extent that “The Philosophy” (like the other lesser known works you mention) shows that there’s more to Poe than just a few creepy stories that we spool out round about the end of October. But it’s also fair to say that “The Philosophy” was itself actually meant to “peddle” a certain “facsimile” to popular culture. That’s to say, many have argued that the essay is a satiric exaggeration if not outright joke. Even though he died destitute, Poe was a shrewd self-promoter and a cannily self-aware celebrity. However serious we take this image of Poe as the anti-Romantic democratizer of art (as you set him up here), he’s also surely the trickster who is packaging this image to continue to capitalize on his most successful work, “The Raven.” You write about “The Philosophy” like it’s supposed to rescue Poe from pop culture–to put him with the polymathic Greats who wouldn’t deign to be packaged and marketed. But Poe himself had pop appeal in mind when writing both “The Philosophy” and, perhaps more importantly, “The Raven.”

If my son hasn’t napped by 2 p.m., I’m right on the edge of sanity. Disappointment about not being able to do my own work while he’s up is at its peak. I can’t write, I can’t grade, I can’t do anything.